Catalog

Ms Butterfly is a futuristic electro-acoustic music adaptation of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, conceived, produced and directed by Dennis K. Law with music supervision by Zhou Jiaojiao; electronic organ orchestration by Wu Danxia; and analog synthesizer programming by David Wohl. Set in 2036, this blu-ray video of the adaptation of Madame Butterly has lavish sets, costumes, and sound taken from performances at the Denver International Festival of the Arts and Technology.

Susan Kander and Roberta Gumbel's dwb (driving while black) tackles what it means to be a parent of a black child who starts driving. In its swift 45 minutes, the listener spends 16 years with a black mother, feeling her growing fear as her black son moves towards driving age. Librettist and soprano Roberta Gumbel has been called "silver-voiced" by the New York Times. She has appeared with opera companies in Kansas City, Houston, Indianapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Memphis, and toured the United States and Europe in companies of Porgy and Bess, including the renowned Houston Grand Opera production. Composer Susan Kander's music has been heard across the U.S. and in Europe, China, Russia, Australia, and South Africa and she has received commissions from a variety of ensembles including the Minnesota Opera Theater, Opera Theater of St. Louis, the Columbus Opera, and National Symphony Orchestra, among many others. Her music appears on the MSR, Navona, and Loose Can record labels. dwb (driving while black) enjoyed a video premiere on October 23, 2020 as a joint production of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and Opera Omaha.

This recording is a revised version of Cooperstown, originally released in 2015 and was named record of the month by Stereophile. The libretto is based on an essay by A. Bartlett Giamatti titled The Green Fields of the Mind. Composer Sasha Matson says that "Baseball has its own specific historical musical attributes. One of them is the sound of the stadium organ. That sound led me quickly to scoring the music for a Miles jazz quintet. Matson added a vocal cast of five for this one act, nine scene jazz opera. A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory and UCLA, Matson has scored music for feature films and other multi-media in addition to his own compositional work.

Constellations, with music by Efraín Amaya and libretto by Susana Amundarain, is a chamber opera inspired by the life and work of Spanish artist Joan Miró. American composer and conductor Efraín Amaya was born in Venezuela, where he began his musical studies. A graduate of Indiana University and Rice University, Amaya has served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon where he conducted the Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble. His compositions have been performed around the world at international festivals. He is currently on the faculty at Minot State University and conducts the Minot Symphony Orchestra. Recordings of his music appear on the Albany Records and Oberlin Music Record labels.

Composer Daniel Thomas Davis says that Family Secrets: Kith and Kin emerged as a series of loosely related portraits, using poetry and prose by seven of the finest writers currently working in and around the Southern voices of American literature. This musical drama is a hybrid form -- an opera on top of chamber music, or a song cycle inside a monodrama -- perhaps best described as a chamber opera. Davis' music has been performed by the Detroit Symphony, Momenta Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Charlotte Symphony, and Anonymous 4, among many others. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Royal Academy of Music, Peabody Conservatory, and Johns Hopkins University and is on the faculty at SUNY Binghamton. Soprano Andrea Moore is a prizewinner in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has received the Yale School of Music Alumni Award. Her commitment to voices from her native North Carolina has led her to produce, premiere, and develop Family Secrets: Kith and Kin with the North Carolina Opera.

Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions including the Rome Prize and the Grawemeyer Award. On the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, Liang studied at the New England Conservatory and Harvard. Inheritance, his chamber opera with libretto by Matt Donovan draws attention to the hopelessness associated with gun violence in the United States, exploring the psychological effect on one of the heirs to the fortune made by the Winchester rifle, Sarah Winchester. The role of Sarah Winchester is performed by the extraordinary soprano Susan Narucki, who has presented more than 150 world premieres in opera, concert and recording. The opera is cast for three female voices, a male voice, and a chamber ensemble conducted by Steven Schick.

Lucinda y las Flores de la Nochebuena is a children's opera with music by Evan Mack and libretto by Joshua McGuire. The concept was conceived at a National Opera Association Convention when Mack, McGuire, and director Anthony Radford agreed that operas for children were missing from new American opera. Subsequently California State University at Fresno commissioned a 45 minute opera that could tour schools and be performed in opera houses. The result is Lucinda y las Flores de la Nochebuena -- a multicultural Christmas opera for all ages. Since its premiere in Fresno, Lucinda has been produced all over the United States and seen by more than 20,000 children. Composer Evan Mack, a member of the faculty at Skidmore College, has devoted much of his compositional life to opera and song. Mack was named 2018 Professional of the Year by Musical America and was a composing fellow at the John Duffy Composers Institute. Librettist Joshua McGuire has collaborated with Evan Mack on numerous operas. He was commissioned in 2015 to write a libretto for Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative. His is an author as well as being on the faculty at Vanderbilt University.

Rajiv Joseph's spare libretto, based on the book by Salman Rushdie, is full of gifts for an opera composer: love triangle with dancer, acrobat, and ambassador; vaudevillian rehearsal; over-the-top wedding; lonely hotel seduction; and Anarkali's dance -- a grand Khatak show-within-a-show. Rushdie's novel, not at all spare, is part Hindu/Muslim Romeo and Juliet, part Himalayan Paradise Lost -- a meditation on the personal as political, and an allegory of the danger of innocence. The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis commissioned composer Jack Perla to write Shalimar the Clown and this world premiere recording was made in 2016. Perla has steadily forged a reputation for his unique cross-fertilization of jazz, improvisation, and classical music. Librettist Rajiv Joseph is a New York-based playwright who has been called "daring, magnificent, and virtuosic." The recipient of numerous awards, Shalimar the Clown is Mr. Joseph's first opera libretto.

Cendrillon opened at the Paris Opéra-Comique on February 22, 1810, and brought unprecedented success to composer Nicolo Isouard and his librettist Charles-Guillaume Étienne. However, beginning in 1817 Rossini's La Cenerentola superceded Isouard's opera and Cendrillon fell into obscurity.The head of Opera Music Studies at Manhattan, William Tracy along with Jennifer Gliere, conductor Pierre Vallet and director Dona D. Vaughn have prepared an entirely new edition and production for this recording. In fact, orchestral parts could not be located, nor the original score. Working from the original manuscript and the first printed edition, Mr. Tracy and Ms. Gliere created the present edition heard here. You can now hear Isouard's brilliant "perfect little jewel box" opera, Cendrillon, last performed in the United States on July 13, 1827 at the Park Theater by a French company from New Orleans.

Jacques Offenbach's mini opéra bouffe L'île de Tulipatan was premiered in September 1868 in Paris and was wildly successful. The hilarious plot, set on a South Seas island, involves cross-dressing and gender confusions, and features a tuneful score. It travelled to Germany and Austria the year following its premier and to the U.K. three seasons later. This charming operetta was recorded live at Radio France in the late 1950s and again in the 1980s, both French-language. The present English translation by Gregg Opelka and Jack Helbig was created in 2003. This recording, from the Light Opera of New York's Spring 2017 live New York City production, is the first for the work in English. The entire Offenbach score is heard with Opelka's lyrics, along with a slightly truncated version of Helbig's snappy spoken dialogue.

Robert Ward's The Crucible was commissioned by the New York City Opera in 1961 and is based directly on the Arthur Miller play, with the libretto by Bernard Stambler. The play, written in 1953, was inspired by the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 50s. The opera won the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Music Critics Circle Citation. A recording of the opera was released in 1961 and this has been the only existing recording of the work until now. Ward himself expressed his desire to have a modern recording of the work to producer John Ostendorf. Purchase Opera, with its deep roster of fine young professional singers and its collaboration with the Purchase Symphony and conductor Hugh Murphy, proved the right fit for this new recording. Ward systematically employs idiosyncratic harmonic language and melodic motifs to create distinct musical landscapes for each of the opera's characters. These landscapes reveal much about each character, sometimes even more than their words do.

Jerome Kern's 1920 Broadway hit, a Rags-to-Riches "Cinderella" musical, was created for Ziegfeld Follies star Marilyn Miller with book and lyrics by Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse and others, is offered in a CD premiere recording, featuring the cast and ensemble of Light Opera of New York with Gerald Steichen, conductor.

Conrad Susa's three-act opera with libretto by Philip Littell, is based on the scandalous 18th century novel by Pierre Chodelos de Laclos, a tale of decadence and revenge told entirely in letters. The plot of The Dangerous Liaisons revolves around the vengeful widow Marquise de Merteuil, who has managed to keep her reputation despite her many amorous affairs, and her sometime lover the Vicomte de Valmont, a well-born rake who does her bidding. The ripple effect of their schemes and amorous exploits results in the deaths of both Valmont and the woman he truly loves, the saintly Madame de Tourvel. Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, Susa's massive score was reduced by Bob Schuneman in 2008 and it is this version that is heard on the recording. The Dangerous Liaisons was recorded live at the acclaimed 2015 Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater production.

It is the obsession of musicologist Hans Moldenhauer to uncover the truth in the killing of Anton Webern by American soldiers in 1945 that drives The Death of Webern, the second collaboration between composer Michael Dellaira and librettist J.D. McClatchy. Webern's brief, luminous compositions altered the course of 20th century music and Dellaira's score contains some wonderful moments of homage as well as moments when Dellaira's writing approaches a Webern-like aesthetic. Dellaira, however, is not beholden to a single style -- he veers seamlessly from dodecaphony to lyrical tonality, from severity to wistfulness and nostalgia, from a passage of lovely Bach-like polyphony to lines reminiscent of 20th century minimalism. Michael Dellaira's other operas include The Secret Agent, which won the Armel International Opera Festival's Laureat. Chéri was a finalist for the American Academy of Arts & Letters Richard Rodgers Award and his monodrama Maud was awarded an ASCAP Morton Gould Award. This world premiere recording is performed by a cast and chamber orchestra from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, conducted by Alan Johnson.

Composer Joseph Summer, who has been fascinated with Shakespeare for most of his life, has composed The Tempest, using a libretto written by his daughter, Eve Summer. Summer is founder and executive director of The Shakespeare Concerts, which presents recitals and recordings of music inspired by the immortal bard. Summer comments that "Everything that Shakespeare limned in The Tempest is about the life of my family, in fine detail. It's not as if incidents of The Tempest make brief appearances, or indeed, happen only once. The plot elements embrace us repeatedly." He goes on to relate his family's banishment from Tennessee; sojourns on desert islands; and being adrift in the Indian Ocean.

Villa Diodati, composed by Mira J. Spektor with libretto by Colette Inez, features the poetry of notorious Romantic poets Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth. The plot revolves around the fateful events of Summer, 1816, when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley penned Frankenstein while staying at the Villa Diodati in Geneva with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. A contemporary American couple on a Swiss train find themselves thrown into the past and into the villa on the dreary summer day when Mrs. Shelley is creating her monster. Later that night, Mary will be haunted by her creation and also by the ghost of her Mother, the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The famous couples fantasize of ghosts and monsters while privately facing their inner demons. Today the haunted Villa Diodati still stands as a landmark, overlooking Lake Geneva. The piece was filmed live at the York Theatre at Saint Peter's Church in New York City, produced by Bank Street Films, starring the beautiful young singers Rachel Arky, Angela Leson, Mike Longo, Jeremy Moore, Hillary Schranze and Rachel Zadkoff. The New York Times (Allan Kozinn) wrote that the vocal setting "recalled some of the more graceful music in Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti" and characterized as particularly appealing a duet between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, "There is no heaven but my love." Reviewing the opera during the New York Musical Theater Festival in 2008, Talkin' Broadway wrote, "Mira J. Spektor (music) and Colette Inez (lyrics) have imbued their show with all the classic elements of success — luxurious love, vibrant-voiced performers, lush poetry, and a visionary director...The unabashedly operatic music wraps you in the warm embrace of the writings timeless romanticism. You'll probably hear no better musical all this year than Villa Diodati."

Victor Herbert's three-act 1914 score (Henry Blossom's song lyrics) -- the clash between a young female composer and an egotistical Broadway librettist based on a play by Frank Mandel, is offered in a new performance edition by Michael Phillips. His revision resulted in a reworking of the lengthy Mandel-Blossom dialog, entailed some minor repositioning of several musical numbers, but left Herbert's score and Blossom's actual song lyrics intact. All music is presented on this recording with a truncated version of Phillips' snappy book. The score is charming with the solo cello prominent and the lead soprano getting the best song, explained by Victor Herbert's own distinguished career as a cellist and his wife's position with the Met Opera.

The opera Judgment of Midas was commissioned by Crawford Greenewalt, Jr. to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sardis excavations in Turkey. Composer Kamran Ince took two stories, inspired by a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, as the basis for the opera. The stories interweave around the ancient city of Sardis and a mythic music contest said to have happened there. Turkish/American composer Kamran Ince's music bridges Anatolia and the Balkans to the West. The energy and rawness of Turkish and Balkan folk music, the spirituality of Byzantium and Ottoman court music, the tradition of European art music and the extrovert and popular qualities in the American psyche are the base of his sound world. Acknowledged as one of America's best composers, Ince is Professor of Composition at the University of Memphis and at MIAM Center for Advanced Research in Music in Istanbul. His numerous prizes include the Rome Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Boulanger Prize and the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His extensive discography appears on Warner Classics, Naxos, Innova, Argo/Decca, and Albany Records.

Thomas Sleeper's Einstein's Inconsistency is a series of eight operas, the longest being about 20 minutes with the shortest just under a minute. On the surface, the operas seem unrelated, but each acts as a sort of mosaic tile to create a treatise on the very nature of existence. What all the characters have in common (a king, a bureaucrat, a critic, a grieving man, a heretic, a priest, a paranoid woman, and finally God) is that they are all at the brink of discovering what it means to exist. When taken as a whole, Einstein's Inconsistency takes the listener into a sort of sonic funhouse. One cannot experience this work and remain unaltered by it. It is clearly a deeply personal piece for the composer and contains some of his most inventive and powerful music to date.

"27" An Opera in Five Acts, owes its origins to the friendship between soprano Stephanie Blythe and the artistic director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, James Robinson. They decided to commission one of Blythe's favorite composers, Ricky Ian Gordon, to create a new work for her. Gordon presented his idea of a fantasy on Gertrude Stein as a potential subject and "27" was born. 27 refers to the address of Stein's salon in Paris, 27 rue de Fleurus. Virgil Thomas said of that address that, "Every story that ever came into the house eventually got told in Alice's way, and [that became] its definitive version." Ricky Ian Gordon, long interested and perhaps obsessed with Gertrude Stein, had always wanted to write an opera about Stein and Alice Toklas. He found the perfect librettist in Royce Vavrek, a Brooklyn-based writer of opera, musical theater, and concert works. This recording was made at the world premiere performances of the work in Saint Louis.

Rarely, if ever, has a successful Broadway show received such unanimously rave reviews, yet disappeared so quickly as Victor Herbert's 1906 Dream City & The Magic Knight. The show traces its genesis to attempts by the celebrated vaudeville team of Lew Fields and Joe Weber to interest Victor Herbert in writing music for one of their shows. Herbert had no interest in writing for vaudeville, but when Weber went out on his own as a producer, he contracted with Herbert for a comic opera. Billed as a "Dramatic Pipe in Two Puffs," the show's zany first act was in the musical comedy style; in the middle of the second act as an operatic burlesque, spoofing the conventions of grand opera, particularly Wagner's Lohengrin. The Ohio Light Opera offers a new performance edition, with complete music and dialogue recorded live at the 2014 Summer Festival.

Victor Herbert and Fred de Gresac’s wonderful 1922 score, Orange Blossoms, is the story of an hilarious culture clash between Americans and Parisians in the Roaring Twenties in the French capital and on the Riviera. Orange Blossoms, written late in Herbert’s career, reflected the public’s new interest in the jazz age and musical comedy. Director Michael Phillips liberally adapted the original three-act musical into a streamlined two-act version accentuating the most unique and innovative aspects of the script and lyrics. The Light Opera of New York was founded in 2006 as a professional company devoted to the performance of staged operettas and operetta concerts.

This world premiere recording of With Blood, With Ink, a dramatic opera with music by Daniel Crozier and libretto by Peter Krask, was made in 2014 at the acclaimed Fort Worth Opera Festival. The opera is based on the extraordinary life of the 17th century Mexican nun, Juana Inés de la Cruz, beloved poet, intellectual, and heroic champion of women's freedom. Her choice of life in a convent over marriage protected her brilliant creative life until she was betrayed by ecclesiastical authorities. Celebrated as the "Phoenix of America," Sor Juana is the first great literary figure in the Americas. Influenced by the operas of Verdi and Britten, With Blood, With Ink, explores how an individual destiny tragically collides with the implacable forces of history and community.

An opera without an orchestra? Composer Michael Ching's A Midsummer Night's Dream - opera a cappella deploys a "voicestra" of a cappella singers rather than instruments in the pit. Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal wrote in her review that this "remarkably inventive opera is a celebration of what voices can do and still, with the exception of a few startling vocal percussion effects, sound like voices. The voicestra supports the singers on stage, its overlapping lines and syllables weaving around them, amplifying their characters and conflicts, sometimes echoing their words (or even their thoughts) or supplying atmosphere." MSND features the original Opera Memphis cast production of January 2011, produced by DeltaCappella, mastered by Tony Huerta, and recorded in legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis, The result is a spellbinding blend of voices that uniquely captures the romance and otherworldliness of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream for today's audiences. The passion and finesse of opera, the vernacular phrasing of musical theatre, and the organic voicing of contemporary a cappella all combine to create a unique and powerful fusion of traditions that provide a novel and beautiful listening experience that illuminates the libretto with what Waleson calls "a human dimension."

Continuing its tradition of commissioning new operas, the Houston Grand Opera gives the world premiere recording of A Coffin in Egypt by Ricky Ian Gordon. Based on Texan playwright Horton Foote's single-character play, A Coffin in Egypt possesses all of the depth and lyricism of grand opera. The libretto by Leonard Foglia and music by Ricky Ian Gordon offer the essence of opera's disarming intimacy. Set in Egypt, Texas, the triple-entendre title is of symbolic significance to believers and Bible scholars, with the final reference to a literal journey taken by Myrtle, the 90-year-old character in the opera. The emotional journey of this opera takes us through our common experiences of joy, pain and the accepting peace of forgiveness. The incomparable Frederica von Stade was lured out of retirement to take on the leading tour-de-force role.

Long overdue, this recording of Virgil Thomson's 1947 opera with libretto by Gertrude Stein by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater, makes a major American opera available. The opera, commissioned by the Alice A. Ditson Fund, tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, but Stein's approach mixes real and fictional characters from different historical periods. Premiered at Columbia University, the opera impressed the distinguished audience and press, but neither of New York's major opera companies took on the work. Thomson's music, a continuation of his style of making text come alive through natural inflections and sparing instrumental supports, is suggestive of its American theme with fanfares, political songs, Salvation Army-style marches and parlor songs.

This recording of the hilarious Gilbert & Sullivan 1878 comic opera was made at the 2013 Ohio Light Opera Festival and includes complete music and dialog. H.M.S. Pinafore has been the most frequently performed work at the Ohio Light Opera and an audience favorite on both sides of the Atlantic since its initial run.

Recorded at the premiere performance by the Center for Contemporary Opera in March, 2011, The Secret Agent, with libretto by J.D. McClatchy based on Joseph Conrad's story, has since been presented at the Armel Opera Festival in Hungary and the Opéra Théatre d'Avignon in France. Though the original story was written in 1907, it remains chillingly relevant today in our terror-haunted world. OnStage noted that " in the tradition of "Makropulos Affair," "From the House of the Dead," "Wozzeck" and "Pelléas et Mélisande"— its music is urgent, agitated and intense, with occasional lyrical interludes." This is composer Michael Dellaira's third opera and his first collaboration with the noted librettist J.D. McClatchy.

Glory Denied, the new opera by Tom Cipullo, is the saga of Col. Jim Thompson, the longest-held American POW in U.S. history. Cipullo’s dramatic chamber opera based on the 2001 oral history by Tom Philpott, was recorded live with cast and ensemble of the 2013 Fort Worth Opera Festival. Glory Denied is a distinctly American story encapsulating something of the moral essence of the Vietnam War and the bitterness of the war’s legacy. Tom Cipullo’s score is beautiful and chilling and returns us to a transformative era in our nation’s history.

Blossom Time, Sigmund Romberg's delightful 1921 operetta, is based on the music of Franz Schubert and on that composer's touching love life. Blossom Time opened September 29, 1921 at Broadway's Ambassador Theater. The show played for more than 500 performances and became one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history.

The Ohio Light Opera performs Emmerich Kálmán's delightful three-act operetta in a new English performance. Written by Kálmán in 1915 and called Miss Susie, producers from Broadway secured the first international rights. In 1916, with English lyrics by novelist P.G. Wodehouse, the show opened at the New Amsterdam Theater as Miss Springtime and ran for 227 performances. Spurred by this success, Kálmán sought a German language libretto to adapt Miss Susie for Vienna, where it opened in 1917 and was called The Carnival Fairy. Subsequently mounted in Berlin with significant rewrites by Kálmán, this version in a new English translation is the one used for the Ohio Light Opera production.

The Golden Ticket, a comic opera based on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was commissioned by American Lyric Theater and Felicity Dahl from American composer Peter Ash and British librettist Donald Sturrock. Dahl's fantastic imagination is vividly brought to life in the witty libretto, and the completely original score ingeniously parodies many traditional operatic conventions to help portray the bigger than life characters that inhabit Wonka's world. The opera premiered in 2010 at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, in partnership with Ireland's Wexford Festival Opera and New York's American Lyric Theater, where it was embraced by audiences and critics alike: "Donald Sturrock's libretto captures the wit, wizardry and wonder of Dahl's story about five children who gain access to the legendary Willy Wonka's confectionery establishment in a contest by finding golden tickets in their chocolates. The largely expository first act introduces the lucky children, who instantly become media darlings, but the fun really begins – and the dramatic tempo accelerates – in Act 2 when they go through trials not unlike reality television or perhaps – as children in the audience may someday recognize – The Magic Flute, overseen by Wonka with Sarastro-like benevolence and fearsomeness . Though not widely known, the American composer Ash has produced a fun-filled score with a zippy, contemporary ambience that makes room for a tune or two you can remember and deft allusions to past operas " (London Financial Times) This recording is taken from a live performance of The Golden Ticket at The Atlanta Opera in March 2012, conducted by composer Peter Ash, with a stellar cast including Daniel Okulitch in the role of Willy Wonka and Benjamin P. Wenzelberg as Charlie. The Atlanta Journal Constitution declared, "There may come a day when music teachers everywhere will use characters from The Golden Ticket to teach lessons about voices in opera For parents and teachers who want to introduce young people to the opera, The Golden Ticket is a good start." But, The Golden Ticket is not just for children – it's an opera for everyone who is still young at heart!